literature

The Last Time he Saw her.

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   The last time he saw her, she was about nineteen years old. She was young and fair, her hair long and curled, flowing down her back in a glorious chestnut mane. She was slightly thin, her features a bit plain with a subtle beauty. She dressed modestly, long flowing skirts and her favorite wool sweater. Her eyes held a sense of mystery, they were beautiful, forest green. When he would simply glance at her eyes for even a brief moment he would become trapped. He wondered what she would be thinking about; What stories could her eyes hold within them? Her skin was pale and her face had several freckles. The woman always looked very natural and peaceful to him.

It had been arranged by this young woman's father that she and the man would become married, as she was the only child in the family and her father was growing rather old, too old to take over the family business, the local fish market. They were set to be married in the fall of that year, and she and the man met on several brief occasions. However her father's plans were cut tragically short and he passed away just three weeks before the wedding. The young man was given a scarce opportunity to board ship to America just one week after his death. This was a rare chance, especially for a poor man like himself.

With some hesitation he took his chance, he packed only a few things, just four outfits; His Sunday suit, two sets of day clothes, and his sleep clothes. He also took with him his father's watch, his Bible, and his mother's ring. The one he was planning to put on the young woman's finger just a short while before. He left behind most of his other belongings, always being a man of simple things. One of his few pleasures in life came from poetry, he'd managed to fill a small diary with poems, mostly inspired by the immense beauty surrounding him, the great green land of Ireland, and the girl who he had fallen in love with, whom he never had the chance to bid farewell. He left the diary on the woman's window sill before he left, late at night.

The man often wondered about what his life would turn out as if he had decided to stay and go on with the marriage. Though, stricken with opportunity, he had made his decision. Once he departed the ship to America, he immediately found work as a ranch hand and settled down with a young American girl who, within five years of marriage, had bore him three children. She started to grow bitter after the first two children had been born, she began to hold no interest in motherhood, she'd much rather had never been married in the first place. The man would eventually, too, become bitter. His wife eventually drank herself to death about twelve years into the marriage. She died a bitter and unhappy woman. He continued raising his three children as best as he knew how, and the older he got, and the more years he spent alone, and miserable, he realized that he'd never known so much happiness, as in his homeland.

His three children grew to be very different, each took the loss of their mother and being raised in a broken home in their own way. Very different, yet very similar in the aspect that they all had a desire for independence. The oldest son, ever the optimist, would go on to pursue his writing career in New York, The middle child, the indifferent, went on to own her own bakery. The youngest, the rebel, eloped with a young man at the age of sixteen. None of his children stayed very close to him after the death of their mother. Lonely, and unsuccessful in his work at his ranch, that he recently inherited from his employer after many years of hard work, he decided to sell his land and return to Ireland.

Though he'd earned many things in his years, he was still a man of simple taste. He left only with what he came to the country, with the exception of his new clothes as he'd outgrown his old ones, and a new diary, though this time instead of poetry, it was filled with sketches, His mother's ring, now old and unexpectedly tarnished, as his wife rarely wore it, lay collecting dust in it's old box. Though she left him a widower, she was not buried wearing it. Ruined by his broken family, he boarded the earliest ship to his home. The year was 1948, after things had settled down in Europe at the end of the second World War. It had been twenty four years and seven months exactly since he'd stepped foot in his childhood town.

As he parted the boarding dock and walked closer to the buildings, the memories began to flood back to him, the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, the sun, hidden by the seemingly never ending clouds, the people, the sites that he'd been gazing at from what seems like an entire ocean away, was all a much needed welcome home. As he walked closer to town he saw a rather curious site; A nearly middle aged woman, sitting on a bench, reading a small, leather-bound book, old and tattered. Her hair was messy, and she had noticeable lines on her face, her long, thin fingers turned the pages of the old text. And as the man stood about seven feet away, he took a single step closer. The woman lifted her head, the dim light from the setting sun above the clouds gleamed against her forest green eyes.

"Do I know you, sir?" The woman spoke in a soft and beautiful voice. A hauntingly familiar chime of a voice. The man paused and then summoned the words from his mind. "I'm just a stranger." The man had gained much of an American accent in his years away from home. He stepped one more pace forward, and his eyes, now trapped in the woman's gaze, grew slightly wider. The woman sat up and stepped closer to the man, never breaking eye contact. "Hold out your hand, and close those eyes." The man did. The woman put the small diary in the man's hand, and took the other and lay it on top, gently. Her hands were very warm against his, a feeling he would never forget. "You left this, Lovey." The woman walked away. A single tear steamed down his face as he opened his eyes, the woman gone by this time. He took a long look at the Diary, he knew it from the feel, and upon further inspection of the binding, he was right. In the binding, etched in gold, was the man's name.
So this is the first piece of "literature" I've submitted to DA. I suck at spelling, I know. A critique is always nice. This was a prompt for my American Literature class, the assignment was to start a story starting with the words "The last time he saw her" I think this is more than eight sentences but I don't know how to count, apparently.

(c) Sydney R. O'Connor
© 2012 - 2024 Omaki
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Softcorelumberjack's avatar
I TOLD YOU YOU ARE AMAZING! *tackles* You write so beautifully.